> You're literally making the argument that you're suggesting nobody is making. That ultimately its better for consumers if Tesla has a proprietary connector. Your reason for that line of thinking is because you assume if Tesla didn't have a proprietary connector there would be no market for fast charging at all, or that it would have been massively delayed. You even acknolwedge at some point in time in the future maybe we'll have a standard connector, but clearly there's some reason why it can't be done now and we shouldn't really be demanding for a standard. It took a few comments to draw that out, but as you can see clearly some people are making such an argument as that's ultimately the root of your postiion.

I think you may be confusing an argument about a connector standards with an argument about proprietary networks. I'm saying the connector is basically irrelevant, and not the reason that Tesla's network is proprietary; I'm agreeing that that standards are better than nonstandards for all consumers today, and in the future. A standard connector would make the transition to shared, nonproprietary networks less expensive in the future, but this is basically noise as Tesla's transition from its proprietary connector to CCS2 in Europe shows.

Forcing Tesla to use the CCS standard in the US is a basically irrelevant move unless you also force Tesla to share its fast charging network. So, let's ignore the connector for a moment and focus on the network.

> Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations.

Except Tesla tried exactly this, to make its network shared in the past [0], in part to encourage cost-sharing and all those other good things, and other automakers were not interested. Why wouldn't the other automakers take up Tesla on their offer to share capital costs and join the largest-at-the-time fast charging network?

Because, again, in 2014 (and probably still today), the problem was not an incompatible connector, for which there could be adapters aplenty—it's that legacy manufacturers don't care about EVs, and don't want to spend money on fast charging as a result. Tesla still has a patent reciprocity offer for anyone who wants to support the supercharger connector—but the connector difference is a red herring.

Why would Tesla opening up its network to other vehicles have led to a larger fast charging station network? You are stating this as though it's obvious, but it implies that the only thing stopping anyone else from building fast chargers is that they couldn't use the Tesla connector—which makes no sense.

What has stopped every other manufacturer from building, or partnering, or funding, a fast charger network? Why did VW have to be forced to fund Electrify America because of Dieselgate?

Do you think that if VW honestly thought its future were EVs, and that the reason VW EVs weren't more popular is the lack of a fast charging network, that they would be behaving as they are now? Of course not—they would be building/funding fast chargers as quickly as possible. Instead, they are being dragged kicking and screaming into the EV future by regulation and by the market. They are not building a fast charging network because they do not care about selling EVs.

So, does Tesla benefit from vendor lock-in from the supercharger network and its proprietary connector? Sure. Would there be a larger more compatible network of fast chargers available today if Tesla had made their connector open from the start (i.e., 2011 instead of 2014)? If so, barely—Tesla was, for years, by FAR the largest fast charger network. Nothing prevented other networks from charging Teslas for a fee (and indeed they do now), but they still didn't build.

The reason is not the connector. It's the incentives—we don't have a wide, compatible fast charger network in the US not because Tesla selfishly had a proprietary network, but because no one else wanted to build a large network, and no one else wanted to pay Tesla to share theirs, because prior to 2019, no legacy automaker thought EVs were the future.

Forcing Tesla to open its network today without requiring a cost-sharing on capital expenditures would reduce Tesla's incentive to make its supercharger network larger, because there wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. You would have to also incentivize the industry to build fast charging as a whole, and provide capital to do it, and the EA example shows that this is easier said than done.

Hopefully this helps explain how I can support standards and wish everyone used the same plug, but also be ok with temporary vendor lock-in (via the network, not the connector) so that there's incentive for both Tesla and others to build more fast chargers. These are not mutually incompatible.

[0] https://insideevs.com/news/322223/tesla-to-make-supercharger...